Alright I joined the AMD boards just so I could post this since I couldn't find a place to send an email to AMD with my kudos, not sure if this is the right spot for it but if its not feel free to move it. I'm long winded and don't do tl;dr's

I've never been a fanboy of any particular company but use products that are reliable and dependable, AMD's stock just went up today a little more. Amusingly I still have an AMD 386 DX 40 that I keep around for nostalgia as it was my first system build, I have no way of testing it now as the last 386 motherboard I had finally had its capacitors leak but I assume it still works.

I've been having an overheating issue for the last week or so with my gaming comp, not a big deal it was a little past due for its annual cleaning but was putting it off since I was planning on doing a little mod work on my case. Overheating issue was obvious but windows in its infinite wisdom is never clear with its error logs but I noticed it mostly when gaming so assumed the video card, here AMD gets another pat on the back, a full year without cleaning my vid card was virtually dust free, nicely designed cooler. I did however notice a nice thick blanket of dust under the cpu fan, I run the stock cooler on a Phenom X4 965, one of the best coolers AMD has come out with, I didn't even bother with aftermarket as it keeps it acceptably cool and isn't overly noisy.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right so I was going to take the entire heat sink fan assembly off and give it a good cleaning... the stock thermal pad provides an apparently unbreakable bond to the cpu however and plucked it straight from the socket even after the typical twist to release. I was a bit worried at this point but all the pins were still aligned and I went to work gently prying it from the heatsink... things got messy at this point and the force required to pop it lose was also enough to send it careening off the work bench and plummeting four feet to the hardwood floor accompanied by two bounces. I was at this point mortified. I retrieved the processor and looked in horror at 3 rows of bent pins on one side and a corner of pins five by five bent at heart breaking levels. I will edit the cursing but after close examination no pins had been broken off and the only damage outside the bent pins was to the pcb material had a chip on one corner. I spent the next hour straightening pins and sweating alot which probably slowed work somewhat, finally I had the pins aligned to a point the socket would accept it even though it was a little tight and a little force was required to pop it in, removed it again to ensure no pins had been broken and dropped it back in. Cleaned up the cooler (aside from the dust blanket on top of the heatsink fins it was relatively clean another good design- the hours I've spent cleaning dust/grime out of fins is countless and my normal policy has become just chuck it and buy a new one) and reassembled everything, took a deep breath and booted up. Clean boot and after 4 hours of torture testing I am satisfied (for now will let it run for twenty four hours later) that all is well. Huge sigh of relief.

I doubt there is a drop test or torture test run by AMD to see what kind of physical damage a processor can endure and still function but I ran one today for them and the answer is alot. I've dropped other processors before and the results were not pretty and I don't recommend anyone trying this test out but I'm extremely happy with the outcome regardless.

So the point of this post, I don't know something along the lines of tough resilient processors are awesome, more than anything just wanted to share and will likely be recommending AMD processors for new builds for awhile If AMD monitors these posts or someone wants to forward this to some engineers I'd like to say thanks and keep up the good work

I too almost crapped myself with a similar situation while installing my brand new 965... I did not drop it though, but bending a bunch of pins certainly stills the heart... especially when you just dropped over 200 bones on it and haven't even booted the sucker up!

Passed the 24 hour torture test with flying colors, not a single hiccup. I did, however, get a BSOD shortly after when loading up L4D. The system was feeling a bit sluggish after coming out of the testing though and the cpu temp was running right at 58 so it probably needed a little reboot and rest to begin with as torture tests work cpus in a way that is not realistic with even hardcore use. Since then haven't had any problems and cpu temp is staying well within normal temps peaking highest around 55 when doing some post processing work, my more realistic real world test.

Still pleased and looking forward to the next gen of processors when they come out.